1. Field of the Invention
The invention generally relates to microelectronic circuitry safety mechanisms and particularly to error management in signals of the microelectronic circuitry.
2. Prior Art
As more and more electronics is replacing mechanical parts in systems requiring a high level of safety, such as vehicles, it is also necessary to improve significantly the handling of errors as they occur. These errors may be envisioned as potential problem areas during the design phase of a device but may also present themselves unexpectedly still requiring a safe reaction of the device. Error detection and error correction techniques are commonly used to overcome such errors and provide safer solutions to the market place. However, the increase in the number of errors needing to be controlled and the differences between critical and non-critical errors require more sophisticated approaches to overcome the risks associated therewith.
In particular, and with the multiple types of errors that may present themselves, it is necessary to be able to respond in a prioritized manner to a collection of detected errors that may have different priorities. For example, an error may be presented that is a critical error however two non-critical errors appearing at the same time may have in combination a higher severity than that of the single critical error. Moreover, it may be the case where a particular sequence of non-critical errors may be in fact a critical error. It would therefore be advantageous to provide a solution that enables error control that overcomes deficiencies of the prior art and provide a system equipped with such a solution with the ability to overcome or otherwise safely handle a variety of errors.